Engaging Faculty in Student Success and Retention
Transcript of Engaging Faculty in Student Success and Retention
Engaging Faculty in Student Success and Retention
Andrina Musser, MSSW Academic Technologies Specialist and Online Adjunct Faculty
Ultimate Medical Academy
Why Are We Here?
• Increased faculty interaction with students is directly associated with
increases in student satisfaction with their institution
• Blended learning and online learning needs the structure of an online
system and best practices to provide optimal communication between
faculty and students
Engagement Interaction Academic
Performance Retention & Graduation
What to Expect to LEARN from this Session
• Identify challenges for building interventions and personalization
in the online learning environment
• Provide examples for best practices for faculty engagement with
students at risk for dismissal due to academic progress at the institution
and share specific ways to leverage the Starfish tools to
expand faculty engagement with students
• Provide techniques for increasing the adoption of Starfish
functionality among students, staff, and faculty
• Blended Classrooms
• Flipped Classrooms
• Fully Online
• Limited face to face interaction
• Break down barriers to student
support structures and
communication with other
departments
• Prioritization of student risk to help
staff provide “Just In Time”
intervention to students who need it
most
• Furthering faculty and staff adoption
for using technology tools
• Provide insight to adjunct/remote
faculty to encourage Holistic
Advising with information from the
SIS
Challenges to Meaningful Interactions Online
• Holistic Advising and
implications for Faculty
• Modern Learners who are
they and what do they want
• Computer Mediated
Communication what is it
and how can I leverage it with
modern learners
A Few Higher Education Buzzwords
A fully-online and LMS-centric
institution
With centralized course
development processes
With robust data/reporting
processes supporting both
regulatory and compliance
requirements
5- and 7-week and overlapping
course schedule tracks
A rapidly-changing and highly-
integrated environment
Allied Health School providing
associate degrees and
diplomas
Accreditation through
Commission for
Independent Education
(CIE) and Accrediting
Bureau of Health
Education Schools
(ABHES)
10, 000 students
300 Faculty & 250 Staff
Key Players for Student Support in the Starfish System
Education Leadership Team
Academic Coaches
Faculty
Student Affairs
Disability Services
Online Librarian
Advisors
Classroom Support
Mock Interview Team
Compliance Team
• 100% adoption
• 100% adoption
• >95% adoption
Information Sharing and Maintaining Student Privacy
• Starfish manages relationships so that only staff/faculty who should have
access to student information is able to view the information
• Previous to SIS implementation of the Starfish system, UMA faculty did not
have insight into our SIS and did not know what other departments working
with the student were doing
• With Starfish all staff with relationships to the student can speak with “One
Voice”
Information Sharing and Maintaining Student Privacy
• Two way integration from our SIS to Starfish and from
Starfish back to our SIS
• Empowers all users to know relevant information in the
student’s life
Information Sharing and Computer Mediated Communication
• Add Note vs. Send Message
• Read-receipts on the Notes tab on the student folder
let faculty know if students received their messages
Student Network
o Awareness of student relationships
o Eased navigation for connecting with other staff supporting the student
o See who has raised a flag on the student
AD Risk Flags and Cohort Builder
Definition: Academic Dismissal Risk
Plan of Action: Student messaging
and layered outreach approach to
student support
Path to Automated Flagging for AD
Risk
1. Manual Flags
2. Development of “AD Risk Attributes”
3. Cohort Builder
4. AD Risk Automation with
Experimental flags
5. Use of the Starfish Exporter to
leverage reporting
AD Risk Flags and Cohort Builder
Process Workflow: 1. Send the student a “Welcome” email, which has been pre-configured as
note.
2. During the 5 week course, use Starfish note, “AD Risk Checkpoint” to
document outreach and planning with the student.
Student Created Academic Success Plan
Institution Need: provide a
solution to share a student
created document to assist with
Holistic Advising across the
student life cycle
• Benefits for the solution
• Challenges to the
solution
• Why Starfish is the
answer to sharing the
document with key staff
Academic Improvement Plans for students on Academic Appeals
• Identified opportunities with the
previous process for supporting
students on Academic Appeals
• Pilot created to support appeal
students 04/06/15 through
09/01/2015 to evaluate a case
management approach to
supporting students
Key Players
Faculty
Academic Coaches (tutors)
Advisors
Office of Institutional
Effectiveness
Assisting Learning Outcomes – Actionable Flags
Pareto Principle (80/20)
• Academic Coaching flags
• Advisor Requests
• Faculty Requests
• Missed Work To-Do’s
• General To-Do from Faculty member
TIP: Having the support of the program leadership
ensures that faculty are addressing the Starfish flags
between 48-72 hrs.
TIP: In building out flags, we consider, “do we have the
reporting to manage this and make sure the issue is
being addressed?”
Assisting Learning Outcomes – Actionable Flags
• Using Starfish, we were able to define a
process for requesting students to receive help
for Academic Coaching
• Through data analysis of student success in
retaken courses, we learned that students who
attend coaching for previously failed courses
are statistically significantly more likely to
pass the retake course
Student Engagement in the System
• Modern Learners: learning on-demand and ability to request help
on-demand; access to his or her educational path, mobile
interaction with Learning systems
• View “One on One” relationships and contact information with UMA faculty and
staff
• Schedule appointments with faculty through advertised Office Hours
• Push notifications to mobile devices (email) for student facing tracking items,
appointments, and messages sent out of the system as an email
• View plans created for the student in Starfish
• View key departmental contact information
• Request Help via self-flagging
• COMING SOON: Historical course and final grades
Student Engagement in the System
• “No portal, no problem…”
• Access to view grades earned in final week of class after access
to the grade book has ended
Student Engagement in the System
TIPS for developing student
facing flags:
• Keep the language simple
• Appeal to the student’s need
and not the department or user
managing the flag
Ways to Increase Adoption – Release Planning
• “It’s starts at day 1,” have an implementation plan that brings all
the players to the table
• Institutionally define Student Success
• Institutionally define the best departments or teams to
manage specific student support problems
• AGILE approach to deployment of functionality
• Faculty Roundtables (Stakeholder in product decisions)
• Don’t turn everything on at once
• Pilots for functionality and survey groups on perceived
success or improvement on workflows
Ways to Increase Adoption – training & support
Faculty Specific
• Faculty Onboarding and Continuing
training for functionality
• EDU101 and Starfish Onboarding
for new faculty members
Student Specific
• Advisor and Classroom support
training on all student releases
• Email Campaigns
• Video training for students
• Social Media campaign
• Links to support documents within
LMS classrooms
Summary of Session
• Challenges of
implementing student
success tools and
engaging faculty
• Starfish product aligns to
supporting the modern
learners and empowering
institutions to develop
workflows for student
success
Institutional Examples of Starfish Implementations
designed to engage students
and faculty
Lessons Learned and
tips for Adoption &
Training • Implementation Planning
• Best Practices for helping
users feel comfortable using
the system